Adrift: Part 2

About the series

This is the second story in a series that will look at the state of America’s space program. In this installment, we examine NASA’s efforts to build and fly a heavy-lift rocket in a time of constrained budgets.

Over the remainder of 2014 science writer Eric Berger and photographer Smiley Pool will look at the collapse of the Constellation program, Congressional infighting for funds, shifting priorities of successive White House administrations, the promise of private space companies and, ultimately, the fate of Houston as Space City.

Science writer Eric Berger discusses his investigation into the state of NASA.

Above: Visitors on a bus tour make a stop at the historic Redstone test site, a National Historic Landmark at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Story by Eric Berger Photos by Smiley N. Pool

NASA’s new rocket drives ambition, fuels doubt

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Todd May’s corner office overlooks the tree-lined hills where Wernher von Braun made the most powerful rockets the world has ever known.

Just down the road stands a massive building, taller than a football field is long, where von Braun’s mighty Saturn V rocket underwent tests ahead of its triumphant lunar destiny. Atop another rise there’s a rickety looking tower where, as NASA desperately sought to keep pace with the Russians, von Braun tested a modified missile that carried the first American into space.

These and other historic Apollo buildings at Marshall Space Flight Center remain today, rusted reminders that once, long ago, Alabama rocketry made the world stand at attention.

Though barely out of diapers during the lunar landings, May soaked them up. Later he would discover talents similar to von Braun, a genius for organizing the work of engineers and a passion for spaceflight. And now May finds himself designing a rocket that could become even larger than von Braun’s Saturn V.

One day this spring, as verdant green spread across the Appalachian foothills beyond his windows, May spoke in a sonorous Southern accent of his conviction that the seeds of NASA’s spaceflight renaissance are being planted right here and right now.

“I believe in what we’re trying to do here,” he said. “And I believe that we are bringing a revolutionary capability to the world.”

The Space Launch System, or SLS, is the seed - a super-sized rocket NASA hasn't had in decades. If everything goes right for May, NASA can build this rocket that can again take humans beyond low-Earth orbit where they have remained confined for 40 years. The catch is this: Washington isn’t giving NASA nearly enough money to actually do this.

The task of rocket building gobbles up so much of NASA’s meager exploration budget there’s no money left to develop payloads; the spacecraft, the living quarters, rovers or all of the stuff NASA needs if it wants to send humans to the moon, the surface of an asteroid or Mars.

For this reason critics, and there are many, have dubbed the SLS a “rocket to nowhere.”

May doesn’t believe it’s a rocket to nowhere. And neither do the hundreds of engineers, many of them children of Apollo who followed their dreams to Marshall and NASA’s other nine field centers scattered around the country.

And critics be damned, May’s rocket is being built.

Likely sometime this month Charles Bolden, the space agency’s administrator, is expected to formally switch the program from its “formulation” stage into “implementation,” a Rubicon of sorts known as Key Decision Point-C.

To date NASA has spent only about 30 percent of the SLS’s estimated $9 billion development cost. Bolden’s decision will greenlight spending the rest.

When that happens it will further cement May’s place as a modern-day von Braun. But unlike von Braun, the Nazi who built the V2 rocket and surrendered to the Americans as a prized captive, May is a native Southerner. Asked why NASA should explore space, he jests in a faux redneck accent, “Murica! Murica is founded on guns and exploration.”

Growing up he’d visit his grandfather, on the northern Gulf of Mexico coast, and watch lunar eclipses from the beach while recalling Apollo.

His, then, are Southern roots that run as deep as those of Huntsville, the sleepy cotton town that improbably became “Rocket City” after von Braun and his German rocket scientists moved here in 1950. Initially the Germans built missiles for the U.S. Army, but that changed in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite into orbit.

America turned to von Braun and he delivered by launching the Explorer 1 satellite. Later in 1958 President Eisenhower signed the law that created NASA and based its rocket operations at what would become known as Marshall Space Flight Center.

Rocket City — Huntsville, Ala.

A Saturn V rocket replica at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center rises above a nearby Dollar General store in Huntsville, Ala.

The historic Redstone test stand rises over buried railroad tankers that served as control bunkers for tests.

A sign warning of the mothballed status of the historic Redstone test stand is seen behind peeling paint and rust.

Visitors to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center pass a re-creation of Werhner Von Braun's office.

Controllers direct science activities on the ISS from the Payload Operations Center at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Steet names at the Marshall Space Flight Center commemorate the Saturn V rocket and the The Lunar Module.

Technicians at the Marshall Space Flight Center prepare scale model of the Space Launch System for acoustic testing.

Visitors tour a display on the history of "Rocket City" at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.

A replica of a Saturn V rocket in the Rocket Park at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center rises above the city of Huntsville, Ala.

In Huntsville, von Braun remains NASA’s real hero. Two years ago, at the Space and Rocket Center here, the city held a huge 100th birthday celebration in his memory that featured his daughters, an 8-foot cake shaped like a Saturn V rocket and wristbands emblazoned with WWvBD.

There’s no doubt what von Braun would do today. He’d tell Todd May to build the Space Launch System.

Critics of the SLS contend the rocket is too expensive to build, fly and maintain. Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director and a contemporary of von Braun’s, offers just one example. SLS uses four space shuttle engines for most of its thrust, Kraft says. These $40 million engines were reused by the shuttle. But the SLS discards them.

“You’re going to burn those engines and throw them away,” Kraft said. “My God, you can’t do that very often unless you’ve got a lot of money.”

May turns the cost issue around.

Space Launch System program manager Todd May discusses the SLS budget in relation to overall NASA and federal budgets.

“My question would be, how could we afford not to do this?” May asked. “Great nations explore. Great nations push their boundaries. And this country has continued to the limits of what we know and learn for a generation, and I think we’ve got to continue to explore.”

And in the larger perspective, he argues, SLS does not cost that much. NASA spends about $1.6 billion a year building it, less than 9 percent of the space agency’s total budget, he said, which is itself less than one half of one percent of the federal budget.

“I think it’s a relatively small amount of money to set the leadership for the world in space exploration,” he says.

Last week the National Research Council published its report on future directions for the U.S. human spaceflight program, raising serious concerns about the sustainability of the rocket. It noted that the Apollo program launched the Saturn V rocket every four months, and the space shuttle flew on average every three months over a span of three decades.

But because the SLS is so expensive to fly and maintain, the planned time between the first launch, in 2017, and the next launch is four or five years. Eventually the rocket may be able to fly more regularly. SLS flight rates, the report argues, likely “will not be sustainable over the course of an exploration pathway that spans decades.”

May doesn’t dwell on the skepticism. Like a good engineer, he knows what he can control, and what he cannot. And whether it was saving the Apollo 13 crew or fixing the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA solves problems.

“It’s a challenge, and if we didn’t have a challenge a lot of people wouldn’t be working for NASA,” he says. “The technology of this thing, to get it to fly, is not our biggest challenge right now. Doing things in a new, more efficient way to enable exploration is our challenge.”

NASA’s first heavy-lift rocket in four decades, SLS is a throwback to the von Braun era of big, brawny boosters. It is necessary to go to Mars.

“Big is not bad,” May says. “If you really want to colonize somewhere you’re going to need to send a lot of stuff over there. We humans are very needy. Just think about the water, or just the t-shirts. A lot of little things is not the way to do it.”

But outside the space agency there are many who say NASA would in fact do better to rely on privately developed rockets which, although smaller, cost far less and would free up NASA’s budget to build the things needed for actual missions closer to Earth, in and around the moon. Mars, they argue, simply isn’t affordable in the near future, and trying to get there will bankrupt the space agency.

“NASA does much better as a center of expertise in new technology than a provider of trucking services,” said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR, which is building a reusable spacecraft.

Marshall is, without question, feeling the heat of the private sector. SpaceX already delivers cargo to the International Space Station, and the company’s founder, Elon Musk, says his proposed Falcon 9 Heavy rocket should ready by next year. If successful, Musk’s rocket would lift 53 metric tons to orbit, nearly as much as the 70 tons of the SLS’s initial configuration. Musk’s rocket will fly for a small fraction of the cost of the SLS, and has cost American taxpayers nothing to develop.

Yet the Falcon 9 Heavy is no sure bet, and though he’s diplomatic, May can’t resist taking a shot at it.

The SpaceX rocket’s development has been shrouded in secrecy, and arguably it’s more complex than the SLS. The NASA rocket has just four main engines, but Musk’s heavy-lift rocket straps together three of his Falcon 9 rockets, and each of those rockets is powered by nine smaller engines.

Complexity is the enemy of rocketry, because the more complex a system is, the more ways in which it can fail. So proponents of the SLS point out that only four big engines need to be lit for its launch, whereas the Falcon Heavy needs 27.

May recalls a rocket the Russians developed in the 1960s, the N1, to compete with the Saturn V. It had 30 engines, and all four attempts to launch it failed, often in spectacular explosions.

NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, an ardent proponent of the SLS, is not above sniping at SpaceX either.

“Let’s be very honest,” Bolden said in an interview. “We don’t have a commercially available heavy-lift vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It’s on the drawing board right now. SLS is real.”

The comment was telling of Bolden’s bias, considering that Musk’s Falcon 9 Heavy could in fact make its first flight in less than a year, but SLS won’t be ready to fly until the end of 2017.

All the same, Bolden is correct about the SLS. NASA’s rocket has moved beyond the drawing board.

Driving a golf cart through NASA’s rocket building factory, the Michoud Assembly Facility in southern Louisiana, Rick Navarro says, “Look around. This is a real rocket. It’s not a Power Point rocket.”

“The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It’s on the drawing board right now. SLS is real.”

Charles Bolden - NASA administrator

Sandwiched on a sinking strip of land between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, Michoud builds the rockets Huntsville engineers design. This place built the Saturn V, and it built the space shuttle’s external fuel tank.

Now it’s building the SLS core stage, the backbone and brains of the rocket. With all the background din at the factory now Navarro had to speak into a microphone to be heard. At stations across the factory floor workers were building “barrels” to contain either liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen, the principal rocket fuels because they’re light and burn hot.

Navarro is here because he took a leap of faith. Before coming to Michoud Navarro was flying actual rockets. He was Boeing’s launch director at Kennedy Space Center. He called the shots on real rockets that were launching satellites into space.

But when Boeing landed the contract to build the SLS he jumped at the chance to move to Louisiana and lead the effort.

“I grew up in Puerto Rico,” Navarro said. “I watched the Apollo landings and I was absolutely inspired. This has been in my blood my whole life. I really always wanted to graduate from unmanned vehicles into exploration. It took me a lifetime of work to get to a job like this. It truly is a dream job.”

Engineers at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans work on barrel section of the Space Launch System core stage.

To build the SLS core stage workers stack seven barrels that will be loaded with oxygen and hydrogen. They are making test barrels now, but by year’s end of the year will start making barrels to be used in the 2017 test flight.

All around are gleaming new tools built at Michoud to accommodate a 5.5-million pound rocket. Most notable is a 170-foot-tall “vertical assembly center, a giant Pez-dispenser to be used to stack the SLS barrels. Its foundation, with pilings 100 feet deep, could support the One Shell Building in downtown Houston and allows technicians to weld the core together to an accuracy a thousandth of an inch.

In short order NASA has invested tens of millions of dollars into facilities at Michoud.

One reason, of course, is to build SLS as quickly as possible. But Peter Wilson, a national defense analyst with the Rand Corporation who tracks space issues, believes there is another reason as well.

“They’re throwing the money into this program, into places like Michoud, to make it very expensive to change course,” Wilson said.

NASA changed course four years ago when, in a cauldron of desperation, SLS was born after President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation Program.

Established by President George W. Bush, Constellation was designed to build a capsule and rocket to replace the space shuttle and fly deeper into space. But it had gone underfunded and fell woefully behind schedule. NASA’s first effort to build a big rocket on a budget failed.

Yet NASA and its allies in Congress fought back, saying the space agency was on the verge of irretrievably losing the decades of institutional knowledge it had gleaned in human spaceflight.

In resurrecting key components of Constellation, the rocket and the Orion spacecraft, Congress got mostly what it wanted, albeit under a new name.

Explore locations associated with the building of the SLS with this interactive map.

Capitol Hill wanted the SLS because it delivers jobs. Marshall Space Flight Center, alone, accounts for more than 6,000 jobs and has an estimated economic impact of $2.5 billion in Alabama. It’s added hundreds in Michoud, with more to come as the program ramps up.

But for the engineers and technicians in Alabama -- the men and women who design the rockets, who think about everything that could possibly go wrong during a launch, who run all the simulations, and who conduct countless tests to make sure the massive vibrations during a launch won’t tear the rocket apart -- this is more than a job.

For Marshall engineers like Kurt Jackson, it’s a calling.

Shortly after the end of the space shuttle program, in the summer of 2011, an astronaut’s wife gave a fitting tribute to NASA rocket scientists and technicians. Sandra Ferguson, wife of Chris Ferguson, the commander of the final shuttle mission, was asked how nervous she gets during the really gritty part of a flight, launch and landing.

Engines fire on 5-percent scale model of the SLS during a round of acoustic testing at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Some, of course, but not as much as you might think, she replied. Why? Because there are thousands and thousands of NASA people, she explained, whose singular purpose is to ensure that her husband returns home to Houston safe.

“The real reason we are doing all of this testing, early and often is, when we push that button and send those astronauts off to space, we want them to be as safe as possible,” Jackson said.

His is a cool job. Jackson’s building the brains of the core stage of what would be the biggest, baddest rocket to ever blast off Earth.

A young engineer from Atlanta, when he came to Marshall in 1983 the center was working on non-rocket projects like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. These were two of of NASA’s “great observatories” that helped astronomers divine the secrets of the universe.

But Marshall’s roots lay in rockets, not science, and Huntsville had fallen on hard times after Apollo ended. Boom turned to bust in the 1970s as the area lost nearly 10,000 aerospace and defense jobs.

For engineers like Jackson, SLS offers northern Alabama a return to its former glory.

Pacing around a cavernous laboratory that’s filled with the shell of the SLS core, explaining how rockets aren’t just big cans of fuel to be lit like a firecracker, Jackson exudes enthusiasm. A lot goes into keeping a rocket pointed upward in flight, and they have sophisticated software and computers on board to make instant course corrections. Jackson oversees development of this, the SLS “avionics” system.

“For me, personally, you hear people saying they work their entire careers, and sometimes they say it’s just about the job,” says Jackson. “But for me I can say I have lived my dream. I’m getting up near retirement age, but I want to see this through. I see this as the capstone on my career.”

Things are a lot different now than they were during the Apollo era.

Like a lot of the modern world, Jackson and his team spend much of the day sitting in front of computers. They run countless simulations on all of the rocket’s software and hardware to understand how the system, as a whole, will perform during a launch.

In the old days von Braun and his German and American engineers didn’t have Macs, or PCs or high-definition monitors upon which to watch simulated launches play out. So what did they do when they wanted to see if their rocket design worked? “They blew a lot of stuff up,” said Ashley Lee, one of the lead engineers working on SLS software.

Although May, Navarro and Jackson all have the gray hairs to prove they lived to see Apollo, they realize it’s a different time. NASA’s budget isn’t what it once was. There’s no national urgency to fly the SLS. NASA no longer has a monopoly on rocketry. And it’s not clear a rocket plan that flourished in the 1960s can do so half a century later.

Perhaps because they grew up in an age when America and NASA succeeded more than it failed, they believe that if only they can build the best rocket they can, Washington will agree on some destinations and provide the money to go and fly. SLS is their field of dreams, and with the right budget SLS could be a home run.

But the fortunes of SLS, designed in Huntsville and built in Michoud, will be decided in Washington, not Hollywood.